Seasonal
by El Burrito
Summary: Cloud meets Reno four times in a year, with new beginnings as well as an end to everything he needs to leave behind.
1. Winter

Winter you find him in the depths of Midgar, smoking and staring at the ground. It's raining, bullet-hard and cold the way only Midgar knows how to rain, and he's under the only bit of awning for miles, but if it's dead or close to him the choice is obvious. You turn away to continue, but he calls after you, "Cloud." His voice is a barely audible croak and when you turn around he hasn't moved his gaze.

It isn't much of an opener and you know it's a dumb thing to do, but you go back anyway, lean against the wall beside him. At least you're out of the rain. He offers you nothing more; words, acknowledgement, not even a cigarette. You don't smoke, but he couldn't know that, and who is he to presume you haven't changed in nine years?

"They say it might snow." His words come from nowhere again, and are so average, so restrained, so un-Reno you can think of nothing to say. It's been so long since it was just the two of you, and he wasn't trying to kill you and you weren't trying to kill him.

"We don't talk about the weather much," you finally reply, which is true save occasional comments that it's too cold for work today and such-and-such will never be finished unless it warms up and Wutai is never all gloomy like this and Cloud please don't go out today.

Reno snorts but says nothing more. You both look out into the rain for a while.

"Do you remember the time we got trapped off base in that storm?" he asks, and this time you're less taken aback by the suddenness, even though it's the sort of comment that would usually take you aback anywhere, anytime.

"No," you say, which you think is truth. You can remember flashing pink light and pure white terror, but you've learned not to trust your memories, and don't want to talk about things anyway. You wish he'd go back to the weather.

"You were sure you'd be thrown out. It was the first time you'd ever yelled at us."

"Why are you telling me this?" you ask him, more harshly than you probably need to.

He looks up at you at last. It isn't like him to remain sitting, to let you loom above him so he has to tilt his head right back, but then, you remind yourself, you don't know him anymore, if you ever did.

"I don't know," he says, genuinely, as confused as you are. "It's just… some things need to be said, you know? It isn't good to just… leave things."

"Yeah well. Some things need to be left," you tell him like you mean it, and you do. That wasn't the same you kicking restlessly at the ground, and he isn't the same him who drew from his cigarette and laughed into the sky, swaying madly from something he'd drank, or something he'd taken, or possibly just from himself. And there wasn't the third person, the ever-present, ever-buoyant completion of the triangle, or the circle, or everything. That's all you have, you can't properly even remember what it was like back then, or if it's worth whatever it will take for whatever it could be.

He's still staring at you. "Why'd you come over here then?"

You have no answer, except, because he called you. And that isn't an answer. "Why'd you ask me to?" you reply, though that still doesn't even come close to answering anything.

"Long story," he says, and you take that to mean he hasn't got one either.

It occurs to you that you have no idea what he's up to these days, why he's out here in the rain. If the Turks are still together he's still with them, but no one's tried to kill you lately. Then again, you're not doing anything to warrant being killed, so maybe they just don't care about you anymore.

"We never could talk without Zack."

It shouldn't still hurt like it does, and you can see that he can see it. But _you_ can see that it hurts him too. This surprises you, though thinking about it you don't really know why.

"I still remember him," Reno offers by way of explanation. Maybe you don't need to talk.

"So do I," you reply. "Sort of."

"Well." He leans his head back against the wall, sucks in air through his teeth. "What the fuck else do we need?" He says it like it's a real question, like he wants an answer, but you have none to give him, to give anyone. In the end you don't need to, because suddenly it does start to snow. It's brown and slushy, but it is something, and as Reno stands and walks into it you see that his hand is under his shirt and it's red with blood, all of it, and red is pooling into the snow at your feet and he leaves a trail of it, and he's pretty much doomed.

You don't go after him because he's Reno and doomed is his domain, and because where you are certainly isn't the type of place where you could offer to help him, or he'd accept it, and you don't even know whether you want him alive another day, but you are somewhere, and he's there too, you suppose.


	2. Spring

A/N Spring haha, the thawing ie massive, unashamed emo. Possibly angstier than AC, but do enjoy please!

Spring you're suddenly _there_, and so is he, and you don't know the why to either. You spent the day in the open, wandering the crumbling sun-bleached paths. They wind about like a skeleton, like the whole place was once a living, breathing organism now reduced to an empty frame.

You didn't know why you were there. You'd thought that you'd finished up all your business there long ago, or at least by now you should have. You were so sure that you'd let go, that she was gone for good and you could face that, but then you were back, steadfast in the past and you didn't know how not to be. There'd just been one more argument, or one more barrage of Tifa's complaints landing flat against your silent deference, and _why_ didn't you ever respond Cloud it was like talking to a wall and didn't you feel _anything_?

You supposed you must but didn't then, hadn't there, so you left that night and then somehow were here. The land was as stark as Tifa must think you were inside, and you thought maybe, you were here because you were called. Maybe you'd been called here to die, to just settle down mutely and join your bones with the land's, here where you'd lost all that you had left to give, before you'd even realised you had anything.

But then if you'd been called then so had he, and he had no intention of dying, not here, not now, not ever. And that was a shame, because when you saw him, thigh-deep and whistling in that water where _she _was, you couldn't help but attempt to deliver his end to him.

He looked up and you saw surprise give way to shock give way to momentary fear before he could slap on that cocky grin and jump back, away from Ultima Weapon, and make a clumsy, off-balance block.

"Hey Strife, what's up?"

You ignore his smug banter, fall into the comfortable rhythm of block step thrust block step thrust, not even thinking except that he's in her water and wasn't he dying last time you met? Moot point you supposed, we're all dying and him always more than others; he was the best at it, by now, at everything, only not fighting, not _this _until he's got you down in two feet of water and Ultima's gone from your hand and you're only breathing because he's letting you.

"Now," he says, kindly, warmly, for all the world like a friend except that his fingers are wound through your hair and he's not trying particularly hard to keep you above the water, 'Now, Strife. What's up? What's _really _up?"

"Fuck you," you try to say, only it comes out as "Nrfflgh" and a lot of bubbles and spluttering, but he doesn't seem to notice.

"I mean, since when are you some piss-weak little pussy who just lets people win? Lets _me _win?"

He jabs at his chest with both hands, and that's when you realize that he isn't even holding you anymore. You think you see Ultima glinting a few feet away and you lunge for it, but then his foot is on your spine and you're underwater proper, pressed flat against the bottom and possibly now you are dying, but you just lay your face against the sandy-rough floor, close your eyes and whisper "Sorry."

Your apology rises to the surface in a flurry of bubbles, and he yanks you after it by your collar, then thrashes back through the water and dumps you unceremoniously onto the sand – only it isn't sand, it's sharp shell-grit and it bites into your cheek. She's down here on this _forever, _you think,you made it her final resting place.

"_Christ, _Strife," he breathes, looking at you with mild alarm. You can't imagine how you must look, or again, why he's _here_.

You don't know what you stammer in response; you don't understand your own words, but he seems to.

"The Ancient girl?" He rolls his eyes in exasperation, "What is it with her? Zack, Tseng, you… you're all reduced to fucking babies when her name is mentioned, and she's been gone for years."

It strikes you as odd, his mixture of past and present tense, when she's dead and Zack is dead and Tseng is… well he would know that better than you.

You cough up some water, the water she lives in now, but lie weakly on the shore without replying.

He crunches across the grit and sits beside you. "No really. What _was _so fucking amazing about her that I missed? I mean, your thing for Fair – I gotthat. Crushing on Fair was pretty much compulsory for every Shinra initiate. But some pink-dressed bint? Doesn't compute."

"She was just," you croak, but can't think of any way to finish it. "She was Aeris."

"No shit," he replies at length. He throws a stone into the water, and you wonder, does he know that this is where she is? You don't see how he would but then he's a Turk, knowing everything is pretty much his job.

"And your thing for Sephiroth was, you know, natural. But even the great Sephiroth was affected by her enough to come down or, or to send that monster to or something. Now that's shit's not right."

"It _is,_" you tell him, because your explanation should have been enough, and would have been with anyone else. "If you _knew _her…"

"I did." He sounds surprised that you would question this, and when you briefly raise your head he's staring at you in confusion. "Strife, she was my job for years. Surveillance, retrieval, information-collecting, she was pretty much my induction, training and promotion assignments."

Some part of your stomach hurts, like you've had it clenched for hours. The thought of Reno having known her longer than you did by far, this life that they shared, you don't even know how it makes you feel, only that it hurts. "But you were just watching her-"

"Nah. We talked." He doesn't elaborate, even when you haul yourself up to sit beside him.

"And?" you press, not really expecting him to offer you much even then.

"And. She was just a chick, Strife. She wasn't dumb, sure, and she had an occasionally wicked sense of humour but I sure wouldn't rush out and kill myself for her. I'm certainly not still letting her dictate my life post-mortem."

"She doesn't dictate it," you mutter half-heartedly.

"Sure." He stares at you a while. "Do you really think she wants you to live like this though? Throwing away your life – you know, the thing that you only have because she doesn't – just hanging out waiting for it to end so you can go back to her?"

You don't like philosophical on Reno, or insightfulness or caring, but you can't deny he wears it well. You feel like a child being scolded, beaten then scolded then abandoned, because he rises and painstakingly brushes the grit off his suit. "Anyway, charming though this has been, I do have things I need to get done."

"Why are you here?" you ask him at last.

"Because I was sent." Apparently he's finished talking. "You all done dying now?"

You nod distractedly, and stare out into the lake as he saunters away. Really, you're not. No one is. And you never will be. But you suppose maybe you can slow the rate, if you try. If you want to. And you're willing to concede that maybe, there would be reasons that you do.


	3. Summer

Summer he's in Wutai, and you know because this time you find him on purpose. Yuffie has a tendency to leave long-winded messages on your phone which you listen to without really listening, only this time she mentions "that smarmy red-headed fuck" so many times it gets through, and without needing any elaboration you know who she means.

You arrive two days later and find him in the bar at dusk, speaking fluent Wutaian to a skinny dark-haired boy. He sees you over the boys head, and studies you for a few seconds, expressionless, before muttering a few more words which cause the boy to slip away.

You slide in across from him and pick up a menu, and he waits for you to speak first. The vinyl of the seat catches at your thighs – the bar is more crowded than usual and the night is stuffy. The window beside you is almost steamed up, and Reno's hair is plastered to his forehead with sweat.

"She kept us sane," you tell him suddenly, deciding that no preamble is required when there's no real relationship there to cushion.

His expression still doesn't change as he takes a swig from his drink and nods for you to go on.

"She was just, she controlled everything. "

He really has it down, the silent surveillance, giving nothing away.

"Well. I mean obviously not like that, but…" It occurs to you that you just spent two days travelling across three continents to get here, and wonder why you didn't rehearse this, or try to think through what you were going to say. You pause for a second, and start again. "She was just so damned confident."

Reno nods, blows into the top of his bottle, but is still silent. Maybe he can see that something's changed since the days when you tried to kill him for standing in her lake, or maybe he's still just a dick.

"Later, I guess, now I can see that she wasn't at all as in control and unaffected as she always pretended. But she never let things get to her. She tried to shield everyone, to protect us all and I tried to protect her, but… I couldn't."

"But why now?" Reno asked, leaning back in his seat and drawing his bottle over his forehead. "She died yonks ago, and all you did was pick up your sword and march off and kill Sephiroth and a hundred massive WEAPONS and the finest robots we could muster. You stole a submarine and an airship and went into space and skydived into Midgar and now suddenly you just mope around?"

"I was busy then," you tell him, "I didn't have time to think. And now I can, and I can't stop. I mean, every night, I dream about her. Not just her. All of them, all of them that got crushed by the plate, and all those faceless soldiers who once stood beside me, and Tifa's dad and my mum and even goddamn _Rufus._"

"Strife," he tells you, "I think you need to let go."

"I know. Only, I don't know how. It's like, she's tied to all of them but I can't let go of them and I can't let go of her. You know I barely even talk about her, they all think I'm over it but I can't help but feel like, if I'd just done it all differently..."

He sits up suddenly, but ignores everything you said. "Come on," he tells you, "I want to show you something. Wutai wants to teach you something."

"What?" you ask, but he's already out of his seat. He grabs another drink from the bar and you follow him outside. It's a shade cooler out than in, but you can tell instinctively that the sun isn't going go down fully until much later that night. There are crowds swarming everywhere, giddy children holding sticks spitting sparks into the air.

"It's the longest day of the year," he tells you, "There's going to be a festival."

"You came for a festival?" you ask him, and he shrugs.

"They know how to party over here." You think of Yuffie, think probably you should stay for the festivities, say hi. You know she isn't there yet, or rather, you know that you would know if she were.

The two of you walk toward the river, where the crowd thins a little, and sit down in silence for a while. You can see Da-Chao towering over the town, and suppose it's fitting that this is where you've sought him out, the first place the two of you were united, ever – well, at least ever since the Nibelheim incident. The first time in life take two.

Reno lights a cigarette. "This might be surprising, but I kind of have some experience with this shit. Not the ridiculous survivor guilt or whatever, but the letting go. The two people I cared about most in the world disappeared from my life one day. I didn't know if they were alive or not, and in the end I had to let them go because it was driving me crazy. And then they reappeared, and then one died and one just stayed disappeared and I had to try to let go of them all over again."

"How did you do it?" you ask him. At this point, with no sleep and no inter-personal skills left, you would take advice from Apps if he had it to offer.

"I don't know," he tells you honestly. "I just had to, so I did."

You sit in silence for a while. It was useless advice, but he offered you something and for some reason that means more than his words. You scan the crowd some more for Yuffie, but you can't hear her so that means she's at least a kilometre away.

"I want to let go of her," you tell him, softly, and he nods.

"That's probably a good choice."

You shake your head. "It's not. I _need _to get rid of her. I need to live."

He smiles at you, bright white teeth through the gathering dusk. "Well shit," he says, "Let's get started then."

You weren't asking for him to help you with it, but you're relieved that he is all the same. You don't know why you're doing this, let alone where to start, but he certainly seems to. He grinds out his cigarette, and you both stand. He's brushing the dirt off himself when you realise the crowd is gathering around you, tumbling down to the river. The children hold lamps in opulent red, green, orange, yellow, blue.

You're watching them hop about excitedly when Yuffie appears. She's dressed in a white robe thing, her own lantern the finest of all, shimmering gold and covered with red Wutaian symbols. She kneels at the water's edge, and the crowd goes abruptly silent. She speaks in rushed, raw Wutaian, and you hear the word "Godo" more than a handful of times. She places her lantern on the surface, and it slowly floats away, casting the water with its golden light. At a few more words the children and some adults surge forward and place their own lanterns on the water.

You stand beside Reno, watching them drift away, and glancing over the crowd notice many tearful faces.

"What does it mean?" you whisper to the Turk, who stands with one arm behind his back, watching your Wutaian princess who watches her lantern in silence.

"Goodbye," he says, "Sort of. It's to guide the lingering spirits away from here, forever."

"That's…" you're struck by the timing. Of the coincidence that you appeared here the very day of this festival, without realising- or maybe it isn't. You're here because Reno's here, and you guess he has his reasons to have come.

The lanterns drift out of sight and slowly the people walk back towards the centre of town, some merry and cheering, some grave, or crying.

"C'mon," he says. "Let's go and take care of this."

"Is the festival over?" you ask him.

"Nah, there's still the feast. But don't worry, it'll be here next year." The two of you skirt the crowd, heading for the town entrance. You can't see Yuffie anymore. "Maybe I'll bring you again, and you can make a pretty pink lantern," he says, laughing, and you walk along the river, overtaking the bright lanterns that continue to float seaward.


	4. Autumn

Autumn, you're in the Sleeping Forest, but this time you come ready to say goodbye, and this time the you is plural. You've travelled for weeks because you couldn't think of a destination, because the slums weren't her life, just where she spent it, and the City of the Ancients wasn't the end of her life, just where it happened. You head there anyway, but when you step into the forest, you know. This is where it has to be.

You're carrying the box, of course. Reno has offered to carry it a hundred times but the burden you're removing is yours, so the box must be too. The forest still whispers and twitches in your peripheral. You wonder how many other people have left secrets here, and know that even without Lunar Harp it is on your side. You wonder if Aeris left anything here in the forest's care.

Being autumn, the forest drapes the floor in gold and orange, its branches dripping fire all around. His hair catches in the light occasionally and he fits right in, disappearing briefly as he passes through the foliage. He follows you trustingly, even though you don't know where you're headed. You twist and turn where the forest takes you, and when you finally come to the clearing you stop.

You move to the centre and kneel, and he sits across from you, soil staining the knees of a suit that, after all this travel, was still immaculate. You shuffle the leaves aside and dig into the rich earth; five, ten, twenty handfuls of dirt. Your hands are filthy but you don't have anything to wipe them on, and besides you don't think Aeris would mind this kind of dirt.

The box sits between you, and you lift the lid. The first thing to catch your eye is the one that always did; that innocent pink ribbon, helping to hide the real character of the wicked flower girl. You had expected to have to wrestle it off Marlene – the little girl was notoriously talented at losing everything she owned, but the ribbon hadn't left her hair for a moment in almost two years. However, when you knocked on her door she just smiled at you and reached immediately to untie it. The girl has more than a glimmer of Aeris in her, and when you told her she blushed, and grinned for a week straight.

You trail the ribbon into the hole, releasing it as easily as Marlene had, even if it doesn't feel easy. The next item is old and dying itself, and drops a single yellow petal into the hole as you lift it from the box. Tifa had understood almost as innately as Marlene, and retrieved it for you without asking questions, probably without needing to. You weren't surprised that she still had it, but now she was finally coming to understand other things as well, as she'd asked you to stay for dinner, and invited Reno to ask Rude as well. When you left later that week she had the bald Turk taking over your mop duties, and when you pointed this out she'd whispered that in the very least it meant that the two of you would come back.

The final item in the box is a folded piece of parchment, ancient and crumpled. It buzzes with a tangible aura, but the words dance in front of your eyes, assembling themselves again in the corners of your vision. You know from experience that when the time came they would dissolve back into clear, firm lines, as Omnislash had for you the moment you were ready. But this is Great Gospel, and the words would probably never be read now, ever. You fold it into a small square and drop it into the hole, then you both push dirt over to cover it.

When you're finished he looks at you, and you just look back, suddenly exhausted.

"How am I supposed to feel?" you ask him.

"It doesn't matter, Strife," he replies, "As long as it's something."

It's everything, you think. It's swirling and painful and surely it's too large for a single human to contain. You pat down the earth some more because it's something to do with your hands, and your eyes, and you don't know what else you're meant to be doing. You can feel him watching you, it's something he does a lot, but today he also reaches forward, grabs both your wrists, and when you look up he gives you something to do with your mouth that you weren't expecting.

You have sex on top of the newly turned earth, with the ribbon and flower and the final limit just inches below your curling toes and clutching fingers and so many acres of skin. You can feel your moans being swallowed helpfully by the Forest, and wonder briefly if it's Aeris helping you – but you shove it away because _fuck _Aeris, you're fucking the stupid red-headed idiot who's been waiting 7 years and following you over the same three continents a hundred times and it's good, it's great, it's wonderful, gods, it's gold. Everything is gold.

You lie under the canopy for a while, you don't know how long. You don't speak, because you don't need to. You used to wish you could turn back time; to go back to the days when it was you and Zack and Reno, before you'd ever met Aeris and before either of them could hurt you by leaving. It was a stupid wish, you can see, because losing Zack meant that you could find yourself, and losing Aeris made you be yourself, and losing Reno only meant that you could find him again, on your own terms this time.

You leave knowing you'll probably never be able to come back again, and completely fine with that. The spot is marked with a thick SOLDIER first class shirt – it was too big on you anyway, you don't know why you still wore it – and a crumpled tie that he says he just didn't feel like putting back on.


End file.
